Creating a culture of excellence: five strategies

If we want learners to achieve their full potential and access the highest grades, we need to establish a culture which promotes excellence. But what are the characteristics of an excellence culture? Here are five principles for starters, based on insights I’ve drawn from my work with schools. 

1. Define success, high standards and appropriate levels of progress
2. Apply and communicate the language of high expectations and aspirations throughout the school
3. Celebrate expertise and mastery and normalise intellectual debate
4. Deliberately set up productive failure in your students by continually raising the bar
5. Teach students about the role that personal responsibility and effort plays in success

1. Define success, high standards and appropriate levels of progress

What does success look like for the learner, and how do we transmit that awareness? How do we ensure we as teachers know what we’re aiming for? What are the indicators of excellence, and who generates them? How are they specifically taught in subjects? There are many potential gaps to understanding what the appropriate level of challenge might be for our learners in terms of the work we set and accept. 

Culture, home background and peer group have a huge role to play in setting expectations. For some highly able students, they have become used to being the best in their first school – quite possibly without too much effort. Automatically, their perception of what standards might apply have been corrupted.

2. Apply and communicate the language of high expectations and aspirations throughout the school

• Keep this language clear in newsletters, briefings and all communications with parents. Make it ‘the norm’.
• Avoid any explicit or implicit reference to the ‘geeks and freaks’ stereotypes for smart kids.
• Normalise academic excellence through the school culture and modelling.
• Encourage an intellectual curiosity and bravery that never sets academic learning as beyond anyone’s reach.
• Be comfortable being the voice of expertise, scholarship and academic excellence.
• Be careful never to inadvertently celebrate mediocrity or praise too easily.

Too many students think effort is only for the inept

3. Celebrate expertise and mastery and normalise intellectual debate

Engage effective role-models who embody the joy of learning and the success that results from hard work. Don’t protect students from grappling with difficult tasks as they won’t develop what psychologists call ‘mastery experiences’. Students who have this well-earned sense of mastery are more optimistic and decisive; they’ve learned that they’re capable of overcoming adversity and achieving goals.

Ensure students are routinely expected to give extended, reasoned answers or are at least given that opportunity. And offer teachers CPD time to deepen their subject knowledge.

Teachers can nurture excellence in classrooms by:

• talking about learning and studying as a reward in themselves
• demonstrating your own joy and passion for the subject
• raising students’ engagement and excitement
• keeping lessons high in concepts, low in repetition
• ensuring the students can see the relevance of your subject
• encouraging risk taking by taking risks yourself
• talking about your own learning journey to expertise.

4. Deliberately set up productive failure by continually raising the bar

Building the capacity to resist the temptation to quit when the practice task looks like being beyond a learner’s current ability level is critical to long term achievement. Perseverance and diligence are cardinal Confucian learning virtues. ‘No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

The ‘learning paradox’ is that the more you struggle and even fail while you’re trying to master new information, the better you’re likely to recall and apply that information later. Until we make the high level most challenging demands we will never know if our students would have been capable of reaching the highest standards.

5. Teach students about the role that effort and personal responsibility plays in success

Too many students think effort is only for the inept. It either leads to ‘imposter syndrome’, where a child never really believes that they’re clever and is waiting to be found out, or it leads to a brittle self-image that is way too reliant on externally given accreditation.

Not only does the relationship involving self-esteem and academic results not signify that high self-esteem contributes to high academic results, repeatedly praising children for how intelligent they are has been shown to lower the scores on standardised tests questions.

Teach students that self-esteem cannot be given to them before they embark on a task, but that it comes as the result of tasks being mastered.